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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

delivery

Kiwibot Takes Cracker Barrel to the SuperBowl as Sidewalk Robot Startups Eye New Revenue Streams

Last fall, sidewalk delivery robot pioneer Kiwibot acquired mobile vehicle advertising firm Nickelytics, for $25 million.

At the time, the move seemed a bit out of left field, but in reality, it makes strategic sense. By acquiring Nickelytics, Kiwibot is unlocking a new revenue stream in out-of-home (OOH) advertising—not just on its fleet of 500 delivery robots, but also through Nickelytics’ existing ad formats, including car wraps, truck-based ads, and digital placements in ride-share vehicles.

The move also allows Kiwibot to give OOH advertising-interested brands some pretty cutting-edge features. By integrating its route mapping technology with Nickelytics’ data analytics, Kiwibot enables advertisers to track impressions and engagement more effectively. With a presence across 20+ states, the company can target high-traffic zones with precision.

And what better way to showcase this capability than at the Super Bowl? Kiwibot is deploying 50 branded robots near the Caesars Superdome to promote Cracker Barrel Cheese. These bots won’t just be rolling billboards—they’ll also distribute free cheese samples to game-bound fans. While the Super Bowl is known for over-the-top advertising stunts, Cracker Barrel is taking a different approach. Instead of spending $8 million on a 30-second TV spot, the brand is betting on novelty, hoping for social media buzz and earned media coverage.

Kiwibot, founded in 2017, is part of a broader trend among autonomous delivery companies diversifying their business models. Its peers are making similar moves—Starship is ramping up its own ad-services business, while Serve Robotics is expanding into back-of-house automation through its acquisition of Vebu and the development of its Autocado robot.

VDC Rolls Out Linked Eats, a ‘Value Layer’ Software That Optimizes Virtual Restaurant Operations

It’s no secret that the virtual restaurant space has struggled over the past few years. Longtime operators like Reef, Kitchen United, and NextBite have laid off employees, shut down locations, and, in some cases, sold to another company well below their current valuations.

Those who survived have been rolling up competitors through acquisition and building out their technology stacks. At the top of that list is Virtual Dining Concepts (VDC), the company behind virtual restaurant brands like BeastBurger and Pardon My Cheesesteak.

For much of the past year, VDC has stealthily rolled out its new platform, Linked Eats, to restaurants operating within its network. The software, which is the combined result of tech built by VDC for its restaurant partners and technology acquired through the acquisition of Sauce (which built dynamic pricing tech) and Crave Delivery (ghost kitchen software), is described as an ‘AI-powered’ software tool to optimize virtual restaurant operations. The company says Linked Eats helps operators with revenue management (automating uptime, dispute management, error reconciliation), marketing & promotion management, and dynamic pricing.

According to VDC President and Co-founder Robbie Earl, Linked Eats sits on top of existing POS and delivery management software as a “value layer” designed specifically for virtual restaurant brands.

“We work with a number of the middlewares, we work with the DSPs (delivery service providers), and we’re starting to work with the POS companies and tying it all together,” said Earl. “We want to drive you towards automated actions and have an action-oriented product versus a dashboard-oriented product.”

Linked Eats has rolled out its software with 30 partners to four thousand locations over the past six months, including names such as California Pizza Kitchen, Chuck E. Cheese, and Brio Italian Kitchen. In addition to Earl, who is also the co-founder of VDC, Linked Eats is led by company CEO Devin Wade, who came over when VDC acquired the remnants of Wade’s previous company, Crave.

“In just around six months since going live, Linked Eats is already at a run rate of adding over $10 million per year in gross profitability to restaurants,” said Wade in a press release issued to The Spoon.

The expansion into developing a standalone software business alongside its virtual restaurant brand comes after what’s been an extremely active last year for VDC on its virtual brand side. The company once had 20 virtual brands and trimmed that number down to under a dozen.

“We took the number of brands we had – twenty – down to eight, and we’re at ten now.”

Another big challenge VDC faced over the past years was the ongoing lawsuit with MrBeast over BeastBurger, perhaps the most well-known celebrity-branded virtual kitchen effort of all time. According to Earl, the dispute between VDC and MrBeast is still in the courts, but he says we should hear something on the status of that soon.

“We are still operating the brand. It is still on offer and available, but there will be, I think, some other news coming on it soon,” said Earl.

Looking forward, Earl thinks the growth for Linked Eats will be fueled by demand for operators to expand their digital business, whether it’s a digital order for a virtual brand running out of their kitchen or for their own native business.

“The exciting thing is it doesn’t discriminate between a virtual brand and your regular brand. So, with all of the learnings that we have, this massive data set of hundreds of millions of dollars of digital orders that we generate, we now have all those learnings that we can give to you and your brick-and-mortar restaurant.”

You can watch and hear my full conversation with Robbie Earl below.

The Spoon Catches Up With Robbie Earl to Talk Virtual Restaurants & Linked Eats Roll Out

A Look at the Vayu One Delivery Robot, Which Navigates Bike Lanes to Deliver Your Food

Ever since the founders of Skype launched Starship over eight years ago, we’ve seen an explosion of small-footprint delivery robots that navigate sidewalks to deliver their payloads to consumers.

While these small robots sidestep many of the challenges and regulatory oversight needed for on-road travel, they are, in general, pretty small and usually only travel short distances.

However, a new company called Vayu, founded by former Apple and Lyft execs, hopes to make the robot delivery market (and our groceries) arrive just a little faster by jumping off the curb and into the bike delivery lane with its new robot. The Vayu One, which was formerly introduced today, is a larger form-factor robot which can carry up to 100 pounds of payload and move at 20 miles per hour.

You can see the Vayu One in action in the video provided by the company below:

A Look at Vayu's Bike Lane Delivery Robot

According to the company, the robot uses a transformer-based model (likely a vision language model) combined with a “passive sensor” that enables the robot to navigate without lidar (the laser-light-based navigation technology used by many autonomous automobiles). The company says the robot can navigate roads, and in-store environments, and also drop off the payloads at its delivery destinations unassisted (you can see it do just that in the video).

The video shows a worker using voice commands to control the robot and load packages as it navigates around the store. Unlike the smaller sidewalk robots like those of Serve and Starship, the Vayu One is somewhat sizable, about the length of an e-bike and approximately three feet wide. This makes me wonder how it will navigate within the narrow corridors of some small-format stores.

Interestingly, the company says it has already obtained regulatory approval to operate on some public roads in certain cities. I’m interested to see which cities have greenlit the company, as my guess is that putting a robot onto a public street – even if it’s a bike lane – would require a significant amount of regulatory hoop-hopping compared to sidewalk delivery.

According to the company, they have a deal with a “large e-commerce player” to deploy 2,500 robots to enable ultra-fast delivery. If the deal holds up, Vayu would quickly eclipse the fleet numbers of Serve (which has about 100 robots in the field) and other players in the autonomous bot delivery space.

Vayu is backed by blue-chip VC Khosla Ventures, which recently led a $12.7 million funding round.

Report: Diners Opting for Restaurant-Specific Apps & Kiosks While Deemphasizing 3rd-Party Delivery

A new report published by Tillster shows that quick-service restaurant customers are increasingly opting to use restaurant-specific apps over 3rd party delivery apps.

The report, which analyzed the results of a survey of over 1,000 quick-service and fast-casual diners, showed that the number of customers who used restaurant-owned ordering channels over the past three months has increased 25% compared to last year, and 17% of those surveyed say they plan to use third-party apps and websites less in the coming year.

One reason diners are opting for restaurant-specific apps or websites is that they see them as lower cost. 44% indicated they preferred a restaurant’s app or website because it was less expensive. Another reason is the benefits of native restaurant app loyalty programs; over four in ten of those surveyed pointed to the restaurant loyalty rewards and benefits available through a native restaurant app/website.

Another reason third-party ordering apps are losing their shine is the decreasing number of choices as these platforms scale back the number of restaurants they support. According to Tillster, 45% of those surveyed in 2023 pointed to a “variety of options” as the top reason for preferring third-party apps, a number that dropped to 36% of respondents this year.

The survey also asked diners what they thought of in-store ordering kiosks. The report says an increasing number of diners prefer to order using kiosks, with 57% preferring this option compared to 36% last year.

Why are diners growing more enamored with kiosk ordering? According to the report, a growing preference for kiosk ordering is because many diners see them as quicker, more convenient, and a better way to see ordering options. 34% say ordering with a kiosk is faster (up 10% over last year), and 33% believe it’s more convenient (a 22% bump over the previous year). The biggest reason (45%) cited by diners for preferring kiosks is they say kiosks show them all the options, up 10% over 2023.

While newer approaches, such as remote cashiers or AI-voice bots taking orders, have gained an outsized amount of attention (and, in some cases, provoked outrage), the reality is that the most significant transition taking place today is the rapid adoption of restaurant-specific ordering apps and in-store ordering kiosks. The diner largely sees these solutions as an added convenience compared to solutions that are more on-the-nose regarding technology displacing in-venue workers.

Wonder Launches Membership Program, Eyes Ten Store Rollout As It Leaves Delivery Vans Behind

Wonder, the food delivery startup made famous by its original model that used customized delivery vans, has launched a membership program called Wonder+ the Spoon has learned.

The new program, which costs $7.99 monthly, entitles members to free delivery with no minimum order value. Wonder+ also entitles members to prioritized delivery or pickup via a Wonder “Fast Pass” with each member’s order.

The launch of Wonder+ comes months after the company disclosed it was giving up on cooking food orders curbside in delivery vans. While the original concept developed the company a loyal following of high-frequency customers in the New Jersey suburb in which it launched, it proved incredibly capital-intensive, even for a CEO who had shown a knack for raising eye-popping funding rounds.

“I see a much bigger opportunity to be more profitable, more capital efficient and slightly improve” the customer experience with physical kitchens compared with the food truck system, said Wonder chief Marc Lore.

The membership program launches just weeks after the company opened its second brick-and-mortar location in Westfield, New Jersey. This 4,300-square-foot storefront serves food from 13 restaurant brands, including Bobby Flay Steak, Tejas Barbecue, and Di Fara Pizza. According to the company, the Westfield location will reach customers previously serviced by its delivery vans in Westfield and the adjoining towns of Garwood, Fanwood, Winfield, Scotch Plains, Cranford, and Clark. According to the company, the new locations will support delivery, pickup, and limited dine-in.

While the company has left behind its delivery fleet, it still plans to deliver all food made in Wonder kitchens with its own employees.

“Unlike a ghost kitchen or other delivery services, Wonder is completely vertically-integrated, meaning it owns and operates every single aspect of the process – from the front-end app and prepping of food to the cooking, delivery, and every step in between,” a company spokesperson told The Spoon via email. Wonder couriers will not only handle deliveries made to customers who order via the Wonder app, but also those orders made through third-party apps such as Doordash or Uber Eats.

Wonder’s Westfield location debut follows the opening of its Manhattan location in February, and the company plans to open ten Wonder locations by the end of the year, including in Chelsea location next month and a Brooklyn location in the fall.

Food hall-ish multi-brand offerings are the same general direction some ghost kitchen operators – like Kitchen United with its Mix concept and newer operators like Hungry House – have been moving in recent years, only without the delivery piece. Wonder new direction is reminiscent of European delivery giant Deliveroo’s efforts towards vertical integration with its lineup of virtual brands via Deliveroo Experiences and in-person food halls.

Is Jeff Bezos Eyeing The Buildout of an Underground Delivery Network?

Today, Wendy’s announced they will trial an underground delivery system later this year in partnership with Pipedream Labs. According to the announcement, the system will deliver orders to customers via a carside pick-up portal using “autonomous robots” that traverse an underground pipe system.

Spoon readers might remember Pipedream Labs as the company with big plans to build an underground delivery network of pipes around cities to shuttle food or other items all the way to the home. The company is working with Wendy’s and other restaurants in the near term – you gotta pay the bills after all – but still has hopes to build the bigger vision of a citywide underground delivery network.

In fact, in a recent Twitter thread, Pipedream CTO Canon Reeves said the company is now courting master-planned community builders with a system that would deliver into the home.

According to Reeves, the Home Portal system would look something like this:

Pipedream Labs Home Portal. Photo: Canon Reeves

And the delivery robots look like this:

Pipedream Delivery Robot. Image Credit: Canon Reeves

Building these systems into new master-planned communities makes lots of sense for a couple of reasons, the first of which is retrofitting existing homes for underground to in-home delivery would be extremely hard and very expensive. Master-planned communities present greenfield build opportunities for concepts like this, where customers can be presented with the option as a feature in a new home, and the cost of the home system can be rolled into a mortgage. Home builders can also build out the delivery infrastructure as they lay down other infrastructure, either going underground or along the community right-of-way areas (as they did in Atlanta in a public right-of-way).

But even if the company just focuses on new build opportunities, the idea is still a little far-fetched, the kind of far-fetched where you almost need a utopia-curious billionaire who invests in crazy ideas to get behind something like this.

Someone like, I don’t know, Jeff Bezos:

Jeff Bezos watching a demo of Pipedream Labs Home Portal. Image Credit: Canon Reeves

According to Reeves, Bezos stopped by last month to check out the home delivery prototype. And while Reeves didn’t say anything beyond that – like Bezos is interested in investing in the system – one could speculate that the guy who founded the biggest online ordering marketplace in the US might just be curious about what a future with an underground delivery network might look like.

Could he be there on behalf of Amazon? Maybe. It’s not like Amazon doesn’t invest in delivery infrastructure, and, in fact, the company invested around $40 billion from 2014-2020 and continues to do so. And, let’s not forget, Amazon itself has explored the idea of underground delivery before and was granted a patent for the idea in 2017.

And even if this isn’t an Amazon thing, but a billionaire-investor-Jeff-Bezos-thing, Bezos has shown a penchant for investing in big ideas like space flight, and if Elon can build underground tunnels for shuttling people around in Teslas, Bezos would be entirely in his right to think sending items around underground in pipes might have a future.

Fresh Portal Is a Tech-Powered Take on the Old-Timey Milk Door

When I first saw the Fresh Portal at CES, I thought it made a whole lotta sense. After all, what food-ordering families wouldn’t appreciate the ability to keep groceries or restaurant-delivered food cold or warm until they arrive home from work?

But the idea behind the Fresh Portal isn’t exactly new. In fact, you can go back as far as the early 1900s to find a predecessor in the milk door. Milk doors were built into homes when the milkman was as common as the mailman, an early version of a storage locker where that weekly delivery of milk could be stored until ready for pickup. Like the Fresh Portal, the milk door was actually two doors, one on both the outside and inside with the storage cavity in between.

Milk doors were built into homes to receive delivery of fresh milk

Fresh Portal founder Jeremy High is aware of the history of home delivery storage lockers. In a recent interview with The Spoon, he said his product is a modern, high-tech take on the old-timey milk locker.

“Fresh Portal is a modern twist on that,” High said. “It has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It receives deliveries of the food you’re getting delivered by DoorDash or Instacart, groceries, and even packages.”

Because the Fresh Portal is designed for the modern era of food delivery, it also keeps food hot or cold and has an app that sends notifications to the customer.

“Deliveries stay at the right temperature until you’re ready to get home and deal with them. Fresh Portal is developing a whole new way to interact with the things that you need to live your life.”

High sees the Fresh Portal going into higher-end homes to begin with, not too surprising given High is a home developer. But, over time, he also sees them going into a wide variety of housing types, including condos and apartments.

“We have a multifamily capability as well. If you think about that lobby space where you get deliveries, there’s usually a security door and a second door that’s leading from the lobby to where the residents are. We have a capability that can combine those two.”

While High has taken inspiration from the old-school milkman, he envisions a future world where a more modern version of delivery worker will interact with his product.

“Fresh Portal is going to work with robots and drones,” said High. “As that future is is unfolding, we see that as kind of a future where costs of delivering items to your home will come down because of some new robotic delivery capabilities, and we plan to be on the delivery side of that.”

You can see our full interview with High below. If you’d like to talk to him about Fresh Portal and his ideas for the future of delivery, you can meet him at SKS in just a few weeks. Make sure to get your ticket here.

The Spoon Interviews - Fresh Portal

‘Late Empire Sort of Stuff’: Wonder Faces Backlash Over Environmental Impact of Vans

By and large, the residents of the northern New Jersey suburbs where Wonder delivers agree that the well-funded startup’s food tastes great.

What they can’t agree on is whether having hundreds of Mercedes diesel vans idling curbside each night while Wonder employees prep meals is a good idea at a time when most experts agree climate change is fast becoming an existential crisis.

A story published in yesterday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal details the bickering that has broken out amongst residents of South Orange and Maplewood, New Jersey, about the omnipresent vans zig-zagging through their towns each night.

On the one hand, some feel the Wonder trucks are an unnecessary and carbon-emitting extravagance.

“There’s a stigma of calling the Wonder truck and having them idle outside your house for the decadent purpose of making you dinner in a truck,” resident Will Meyer told the Journal. “It feels like this is late empire sort of stuff.”

And then there are those who don’t see a problem with the trucks.

“It doesn’t bother me,” said Lisa Bressler, who didn’t see the trucks being much different from Amazon and UPS trucks driving around town. “I guess I like unnecessary luxuries.”

For my own part, the trucks seem a bit out of step with efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of food delivery. Serve, a maker of sidewalk delivery robots, asks on their Twitter page why should we use a two-ton car to deliver a two-pound burrito. It’s a legitimate question that makes me wonder if a three or four-ton diesel van sitting outside my home cooking food for 20 minutes is a good idea.

Ok sure, so maybe a couple of hundred vans probably don’t make a huge difference in the grand scheme of things, but what about a scaled-up, USA-wide Wonder? The company has grand plans to eventually take this to cities across the country and if it’s as disruptive as Marc Lore thinks it is, it could essentially reinvent food delivery. In a scenario like that, we’re looking at tens of thousands of Wonder vans driving around every night and sitting curbside.

Wonder’s Scott Hilton told the Journal they are evaluating electric vehicles, so maybe by the time the company rolls out across the country, they’ll have this thing figured out. But for now and the foreseeable future, residents of this New Jersey suburb will continue to debate the impact of Wonder’s vans on the environment.

DoorDash Opens Ghost Kitchen in Brooklyn, Serving Up Little Caesars, MilkBar & More

When DoorDash opened the first DoorDash Kitchen in California back in 2019, we speculated when they’d be expanding their ghost kitchen business beyond their home state.

As it turns out, that answer is almost three years later as the company opens its first location on the east coast. The latest location will be in Brooklyn, where the delivery company will partner up with five restaurants to offer menus for the delivery and take-out location. The restaurant partners for what DoorDash is calling a “delivery-forward food hall” are DOMODOMO, Kings Co Imperial, Pies ‘n’ Thighs, moonbowls, and Little Caesars. DoorDash Kitchens will also offer Birch Coffee and Milk Bar items, two popular NYC-founded chains.

DoorDash’s facilities partner for its NYC food hall ghost kitchen is commercial kitchen-as-a-service startup Nimbus. Nimbus, founded by Camilla Opperman and Samantha Slager, has two (soon to be three) locations in NYC, including Brooklyn, where DoorDash will set up shop. Like many newer commercial kitchen concepts, the idea behind Nimbus was to create space to power virtual brands for delivery and curbside pickup. The new location also has event space, where DoorDash and their restaurant partners can hold community meetings, dinners, and panel conversations.

“DoorDash Kitchens in Downtown Brooklyn will not only bring new restaurants to the neighborhood but offer an exciting new gathering place and create good local jobs for the community,” said Regina Myer, President of Downtown Brooklyn Partnership in the release. “We hope the neighborhood will join us in welcoming this innovative new space to Downtown Brooklyn.”

Brooklyn continues to gain stream as NYC’s center for innovative shared kitchen concepts. Last week Hungry House announced the opening of its Season 2, which included partnerships with ultra-fast grocery provider JOKR and popular Asian sauces and starters CPG brand Omsom.

Watch as Serve’s Sidewalk Robot Completes a Delivery With Level 4 Autonomy

This week, Serve Robotics announced that its sidewalk delivery robot can now complete deliveries at level 4 autonomy. According to the company, this makes their robot the first autonomous vehicle to complete commercial deliveries without the need for human assistance.

For those not familiar with autonomous driving parlance, level 4 autonomy means that Serve’s robot can now navigate a trip without the intervention of a human driver. However, as seen in the video below, at level 4, a human driver can choose to intervene to ensure an extra level of safety (as the Serve driver does at a crosswalk light).

Watch as Serve Delivery Robot Achieves Level 4 Autonomy

According to the announcement, this milestone is the result of a robot built with a highly redundant navigation system employing multiple cutting-edge technologies. The navigation system “includes multiple sensor modalities—active sensors such as lidar and ultrasonics, as well as passive sensors such as cameras—to navigate safely on busy city sidewalks. Serve Robotics’ achievement required development of a wide range of market-leading capabilities, such as automatic emergency braking, vehicle collision avoidance, and fail-safe mechanical braking.”

In the announcement, the company credits a couple of their technology partners in helping to reach this milestone. One of those companies is NVIDIA, whose Jetson platform provides the Serve robot with AI-computing to navigate complex unstructured environments. Serve also gave a shout-out to lidar-maker Ouster, which provides small and power-efficient lidar to help power Serve’s self-driving capabilities.

Up to this point, pretty much all autonomous sidewalk delivery robots employ the help of human drivers to navigate their routes. And even looking forward, even Serve and other bots move to level 4 autonomy, expect remote human drivers to continue to be in demand. That’s because there will always be potential unforeseen circumstances on different routes, and companies (like Serve) will want that extra layer of safety as their bots navigate through dense city environments.

However, with these types of advancements, human robot operators will be able to handle larger fleets over time. While some robot (and drone) delivery services already operate at a multiple-to-one ratio, higher autonomy means humans to robot ratios can increase, allowing pilots to handle more and more robots as they are deployed to the field.

CES 2022 Preview: Carbon Origins Wants to Merge Robot Delivery With the Metaverse

If you’re looking to get a fresh start on a new career in 2022, may I suggest a new occupation as a virtual reality robot delivery driver?

Yes, that’s a job – or at least a new gig – being offered by a startup out of Minneapolis called Carbon Origins. The company, which is building a refrigerated sidewalk delivery robot by the name of Skippy, is looking to assemble a roster of remote robot pilots who will utilize virtual reality technology to pilot Skippy around to businesses and consumer homes.

The company, which launched in early 2021 and participated in Techstars Farm to Fork accelerator this year, will be showcasing the new technology at CES 2022 in January. This past summer, the company started testing an early version of the VR-piloted robot in the above-street skyway system around St Paul, Minnesota and plans to begin testing deliveries to offices and homes in the Minneapolis market starting in January.

You can watch a video of the company’s CEO, Amogha Srirangarajan, piloting a prototype of the Skippy robot using a virtual reality headset below. According to Srirangarajan, the robot uses machine vision to navigate the world using a neural network.

Skippy Demo (04/21)

“What you’re seeing now is Skippy’s neural network, detecting and classifying objects, analyzing the sidewalk, and segmenting safe zones for navigation,” explains Srirangarajan in the demo video.

The Skippy operators – which for some reason the company calls “Skipsters” – use virtual reality headsets to supervise and correct the robot as it navigates through the world.

“Remote human operators, who we lovingly call ‘Skipsters,’ use fully immersive virtual reality headsets to monitor and train Skippy’s neural network in real-time,” said Srirangarajan. “Like an augmented reality PacMan game, Skipsters monitor and correct Skippy’s trajectory, giving Skippy the ability to navigate the human world unlike any other robot on the planet.”

The company emailed me and asked if I wanted to try out piloting a Skippy while in CES next week, and, of course, I said yes. If you also want to become an, um, Skipster too, you can visit the company’s booth or fill out an application to become a driver here.